When an old lover calls from out of the blue, it can send one into a tailspin. A thousand mixed emotions may flood in, among them shock, anger, exhilaration, love, regret, frustration, confusion, trepidation. The surprise can be so overwhelming, you might not be able to put your finger on just what you're feeling. But Gregoire Bouillier can. In spades.

In his second book, "The Mystery Guest," the French writer, who won the prestigious Prix de Flore award for his 2002 memoir, "Rapport Sur Moi" ("Report on Myself"), tells us exactly what he's feeling, moment to moment, in a frantic internal monologue bursting with all the overblown portent, desperate hope, imagined conversations, faux significance and paranoid suppositions one might expect from someone who had his heart broken. His unresolved feelings are exacerbated by the fact that the woman walked out without a word of explanation. Could this call mean she was finally ready to answer the question that has seared his soul for five long years: Why?

The call comes wrapped in its own enigma. Eschewing any reference to their past or her abrupt departure, she simply and cheerily invites him to the birthday party of Sophie Calle, one of France's most celebrated contemporary artists. Calle is the best friend of the ex-girlfriend's husband -- the man she left Bouillier for, with whom she now has a daughter. On this occasion each year, Calle designates one of her friends to bring a mystery guest to the party. This year, 1990, Bouillier's ex is the designated inviter, and she has selected him as the mystery guest.

He agrees to go, sets down the receiver, "and the telephone sat chuckling on the bed until in my rage I lobbed it across the room." He proceeds to spend countless hours obsessing about the meaning of the call, the invitation, the role of mysterious strangers ("wasn't Christ himself a model mystery guest?"), his hopes for reconciliation or at least clarity, what to wear and what to bring as a gift.

LATEST SFGATE VIDEOS

Women, in my experience, do this all the time on a neurotic level, as if choosing the right heels to wear will make the difference between snagging or losing a guy. A woman will talk on the phone or over lunch with a girlfriend, parsing every word a boyfriend, ex-boyfriend or would-be boyfriend has said in a brief conversation, relating how she ran into him in the canned food aisle at Whole Foods, when she never goes down that aisle, so it must mean they're meant to be together!

Bouillier obsesses on a literary level, with eloquence, insight, Proustian perception and allusions to great works of literature (most significantly "Mrs. Dalloway"). At times his conclusions may seem as silly and self-deceptive as those of the gals chatting over a half Caesar, dressing on the side. But his text is brilliantly entertaining and at times hilarious. His biting observations have the ring of truth, whether he's berating himself in his gloomy apartment, where for the longest time he refuses to change the lightbulb (a metaphor for the extinguished relationship) or mocking the celebrity artistic and literary elite he finds at the party.

Symbols are everywhere in Bouillier's consciousness. A cigar is never just a cigar. In one of the funniest parts of the book, he explicates his turtleneck-wearing habit:

"I started wearing turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left. Basically, I never took them off. No doubt this was magical thinking on my part (if I never took them off, nothing would ever take off on me); at any rate, these turtleneck-undershirts erupted in my life without my noticing until it was too late and I was under their curse. ... But if that was the price I had to pay, I told myself, so be it. We brick ourselves up in prisons of our own devising, we spend our lives losing touch with ourselves, disappearing behind what negates us."

He refers to his new girlfriend only as "the one who loved me despite my turtleneck-undershirts."

Amid his self-absorbed romantic musings, Bouillier sprinkles in offbeat social commentaries that are delicious to chew on, such as his analysis of why we use gift wrap: "not for the sake of surprise but rather to cover up the fact that The Gift is based on a lie, as we inevitably discover every time somebody gives us something, yes, and we open it and, after that microsecond when we expect the fulfillment of our deepest desire, disgust and sadness wash over us and we smile as fast as we can and say thank you, the better to bury our chagrin at never once in all our lives receiving something more than what we've hoped for."

He regularly interrupts his long riffs and rants with the aside "as they say," which is not just a verbal tic but also a way of noting that in calling upon a cliche such as "I laid my cards on the table" or "I was barking up the wrong tree" (or their equivalents in the original French), he is not unique in what he's going through. Many have run up against the kind of frustrations he's facing, which can be borne more easily by invoking a metaphor used by the legions who have suffered before him.

In that sense, he's not just one miserable sap trying to get over a brutal breakup. He's a self-deprecating everyman who speaks for all of us in our darkest moments of obsession and despair, clinging to any life raft -- a book, a memory, a new love -- to survive.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.